Waiting for the Elevators

At the end of August, federal Judge George Daniels issued a long-awaited decision denying the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s motion for summary judgment in a class-action lawsuit challenging its failure to maintain subway elevators — a case that I, as a wheelchair user and lifelong New Yorker, helped bring to court more than seven years ago. It may not be obvious from the press release, but this ruling is a major step toward realizing the full promise of the milestone 2023 MTA settlement to build elevators in nearly every station.

For disabled folks who struggle with stairs — by CDC estimates, 12% of Americans — that day cannot come soon enough. Accessibility is a must-have as cities compete to attract visitors and retain residents.

Of course, accessible transit matters outside the disability community too. Subway elevators are often crowded, but not only with people in wheelchairs. Families with strollers, tourists with luggage, workers with deliveries and many older adults rely on lifts. It’s what Angela Glover-Blackwell called “The Curb-Cut Effect” — just like the curb ramps initially required to allow wheelchair users to safely go from sidewalk to street, programs for vulnerable groups often help much broader segments of society.

Unfortunately, the work of installing elevators in far more stations — and getting the elevators we already have working better — depends not only on surmounting legal obstacles but on getting over financial, logistical and bureaucratic hurdles that may be larger still.

My story

I didn’t always need an elevator to get on the train. Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, high school teammates and I took the 1 train to run at track meets in Washington Heights and the Bronx. On weekends, the 1 took me to play basketball at the Columbia University gym, or I rode the 7 to Mets games at Shea Stadium in Queens. None of those stations were wheelchair accessible, and they still aren’t. I didn’t understand how important that was.

That changed one July morning in 2009, when a rotted tree limb snapped from a giant oak as I walked beneath it in Central Park. Landing on my head, the branch fractured my skull and crushed my spine, paralyzing my lower body. Yet after a horrifying instant, a string of remarkable luck allowed me to survive. Good Samaritans and first responders at the scene got me to the hospital, and weeks of expert medical care and a round-the-clock vigil of family and friends pulled me through a monthlong ICU stay.

Once my health was stable enough, I went to a rehabilitation hospital where I embarked on a humbling, arduous journey to relearn what specialists call “activities of daily living”: how to speak, read, eat, drink, shower, toilet and dress. I’d lost one-third of my weight; my lungs were recovering from collapse and infection. I had blurred vision and an unresponsive lower trunk and legs. But a dedicated team of nurses, doctors, physical and occupational therapists helped me adapt, teaching me the skills I’d need to be discharged six months later.

Over the next few years, I returned to my work as a software engineer at Google, taking on the mission to improve Google Maps for wheelchair users and others with disabilities. I also began advocating outside of work, writing “When a Subway Platform is a Trap” for the Daily News in 2014, after being stranded midcommute by broken elevators at Columbus Circle. I wanted to share with other New Yorkers what I had learned: that our subway doesn’t serve everyone equally and that that failure harms our city as a whole.

Taking on the MTA

The struggle to make New York’s subways accessible follows decades of work advocating for the rights of people with disabilities. In the 1970s, Judy Heumann and the generation of activists featured in the documentary “Crip Camp” (2020) fought fiercely for respect and independence, winning passage of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). That law, along with other statutes including New York City Human Rights Law, formed the basis for the class action disability discrimination suits we filed in 2017, demanding that the MTA make every subway station accessible with elevators or other stair-free access (“the construction case”) and keep those elevators working to ensure that access is reliable (“the maintenance case”).

Since our 2017 filing, things have markedly improved. But progress was slow, requiring courtroom losses for the MTA in 2019 and 2021 — and years of advocacy from the Elevator Action Group and others — for MTA leadership to see the light.

But the 2023 construction case settlement was a “hallelujah” moment, when disability advocates and the MTA agreed to a timeline for reaching a 95% accessible system by 2055. And everyday riders are seeing elevator installations rapidly accelerate to meet those benchmarks.

In the maintenance case, their summary judgment motion was initially granted. But that order was overturned by a federal appellate court in 2021, sending the case back to Judge Daniels. Who denied it this August, leading us to the place we now find ourselves.

Where we have a stark mismatch between MTA’s proud, public embrace of accessibility construction — hard work and powerful commitment we all celebrate — and their dogged courtroom insistence in the maintenance case that subway elevators, both existing and new, are working just fine. They aren’t.

In fact, data from a Freedom of Information Law request received in 2016 revealed more than 9,000 annual elevator breakdowns — nearly 25 daily. (This is to say nothing of the elevators that work but smell awful or lurch super slowly from floor to floor.) As Madeleine Richman, an attorney in the maintenance case, said, “People with disabilities are stranded every day and routinely suffer severe disruption to their daily lives because of constant elevator outages across the subway system.”

Action, not excuses

Everyone has heard the excuses for why New York City moves as slowly as it does in building new elevators and fixing old ones. Our system is just too old and our stations are too complicated, say the people in charge. Doing this work necessarily takes years and costs many billions. Have patience; we’ll do what we can as soon as we can do it.

The MTA says new elevators can cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars; in 2022, it estimated that a new set of elevators at the York Street station on the F train would cost $230 million to $260 million. That may have been an outlier, and it’s true that in some cases, elevators can be extraordinarily complex and expensive to install.

But rather than throw up our hands at these kinds of exorbitant costs, we should work hard to scrutinize the underlying reasons for those insane prices — just as people are trying to do with residential elevators — and reinvent the subway elevator so we can build more of them for less.

In a detailed analysis of MTA’s accessibility project spending, New York magazine writer and NYU Marron Institute researcher Nolan Hicks (who also contributed to this issue of Vital City) says “contractors have every incentive to begin with maximalist designs for every accessibility project.” He does the math in the new MTA capital plan and finds “it comes out, on average, to $110 million per station for elevators.” He continues: “Roughly half the cost of a $100 million ADA project, $50 million, is directly linked to the installation.”

Nor should we accept the MTA’s tacit suggestion that we can have either good maintenance or new installations, but not both. Indeed, there is evidence from another city, one with an equally old system, that it’s possible to simultaneously install elevators systemwide and improve reliability.

In Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority settled a similar case in 2006, with an agreement that included benchmarks for constructing and maintaining elevators at T stations. To meet the requirements, breakdowns were closely monitored and repairs prioritized under a new maintenance contract. Elevator reliability increased sharply, with uptime reaching 99.5% in 2008, and staying there for 13 years. In 2022, it dipped to 98% with pandemic supply- chain issues, but partially recovered in 2023. By comparison, a New York City Council report in 2023 found nearly 10% of New York City’s subway elevators out of service at any given time.

Despite these problems, there’s no question current MTA leadership is deeply committed to improving accessibility. In a recent op-ed, Chief Accessibility Officer Quemuel Arroyo cites a truly impressive list of improvements to paratransit, elevator construction and elevator reliability, and vows to continue, he says, “as long as I work at the MTA.” But we can’t leave it to chance whether future MTA leadership shares that commitment. Only a strong legal framework can guarantee a future where every station not only has an elevator, but one that works reliably.

In that spirit, here are immediate, actionable, achievable steps the Authority and Gov. Kathy Hochul, who controls it, should take:

Stop kicking and screaming, and settle the maintenance case. After seven years and another MTA loss, it’s time to stop wasting everyone’s time, and taxpayer millions, by paying lawyers to claim existing maintenance practices are acceptable. We need a clear uptime standard, and during breakdowns, in addition to expediting elevator repairs, transit workers should make regular audio and visual announcements on affected trains and platforms, provide in-person assistance to stranded riders and offer alternate transportation to minimize disruptions.

Restore congestion pricing. In the wake of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s “pause,” 23 promised accessibility projects are now on hold. The $15 billion that car tolls were set to generate was going to pay for, among many other things, 60 new elevators in the upcoming 2025-2029 capital plan. Now, without replacement funding in sight, that’s in doubt.

Rethink elevators, top to bottom. Given the cost and complexity of installing elevators, it’s time for the MTA to create a bureaucracy-busting brain trust of engineers and planners — including experts from outside the agency — to assess every step in elevator planning, design and installation process, creating a best practices playbook for how to do it faster and for less. A similar ask-every-question approach averted the planned L train shutdown in 2019, delivering a playbook to speed future tunnel renovations.

Think beyond mobility. Wheelchair users are the most visible disabled folks, but elevators aren’t the only accessibility need. Clearly audible announcements are critical for blind and low-vision riders, especially during service changes. And the same information must appear on visual displays for deaf and hard-of-hearing riders. These are classic “curb cuts” — improvements that MTA must make for those who need them, which will benefit many nondisabled riders too.

Empower commuters with disabilities. Give leaders of the Advisory Committee on Transit Accessibility (ACTA), a volunteer group of community members with disabilities that has provided feedback to the MTA since 2019, a more formal role — including paid positions reporting to MTA accessibility leads. Today, the MTA’s relationship with the disability community is either purely advisory, verging on cosmetic, or maximally adversarial, via lawsuits. It should be cooperative and constructive. In Boston, a Department of Systemwide Accessibility, created after their legal settlement, has a concrete role reviewing construction and other plans.

Listen better and engage more. The MTA should expand the recently launched Group Station Manager Program, designed to bring station agents out of their booths to hear rider concerns. Putting agents near elevators is a natural way to engage with travelers who may have questions or need assistance, and maintenance problems reported promptly (unlisted outages are a frequent complaint).

Elevators are important not just for those of us who need them to ride safely, but for what they signify. As more stations become accessible, generations of New Yorkers of all abilities will grow up riding together — including to Van Cortlandt Park, where I once ran cross-country races, now among 23 stations with new elevators in progress. Nobody signs up for the disability community, yet I’m so grateful to be part of it, building on the work of generations of advocates so that everyone can participate to the fullest in the vibrant life of this city.